


The Empty Earth She Walks

by sparklight



Series: Coming Home [2]
Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Consent Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Kidnapping, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:07:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25978702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparklight/pseuds/sparklight
Summary: The flowers are the first to wither when Demeter can't find Persephone, and as days turn to weeks turns to months, the earth and humans suffers an angry mother's grief. In the end, something has to give.
Relationships: Demeter & Hecate (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Demeter & Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Series: Coming Home [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1883899
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	The Empty Earth She Walks

"Persephone?"

The earth quails once in an awful shudder, and the flowers are the first to leave.

" _Persephone_!"

Demeter finds the meadow her daughter and her friends were entertaining each other in in uproar as she lands her chariot in a rattle of scales and feathers. And though her heart already knows, trembling, she looks around anyway, looks to the nymphs and to her nieces.

"Where is Persephone?"

The answer is already clear in multiple pairs of eyes, sharing a dark, hesitant glance between them all, but Demeter waits until Artemis shakes her head, bright blue eyes averting her radiant gaze. "We don't know. She disappeared."

And Demeter stands there, breathless, deathless, empty. Stares at these young women, so many, who somehow lost her daughter. In the next breath she whirls around, power and hands reaching for the nearest of the nymphs, twisting, changing - the rest flee, and Artemis and Athena restrain her from attacking any of the other ones.

" _Leave me_! If you don't know where my daughter is, I will find her myself!"

Furious, she tears herself free, gets up on her chariot and brings it into the sky. So many eyes and hands and loving hearts, and yet her daughter could somehow disappear? Who's responsible? Not a mortal, no, and yet she starts there, wanders through the shrines and temples she and her daughter shares, the sky turning leaden in her wake. Empty, and the offerings dry up and go moldy as she passes. Empty, they're all empty. She widens her search.

On a beach in Arcadia Poseidon comes up from the surf, and Demeter suppresses a sigh.

"Not now, Poseidon. I'm busy, unless you know where my daughter is." She doesn't even bother to look at him, for that will only encourage him. He's been very persistent lately, caught between charming flirtation and exhausting annoyance. She's just as much been enjoying the play as it's come to grate on her, but she has, so far, been unable to decide whether she wants to sleep with him or not. Right now, certainly _not_ , and Poseidon doesn't make such an eventual reality any more possible when he looks at her, clearly confused.

"Your daughter? Isn't she where she usually is since you took her off Olympos? You don't want to talk about your _daughter_ with me, Deo," he flashes a grin, and though it's not any different than usual, it tips straight off the cliff into infuriating.

"Right now, my daughter is the _only_ thing I'm interested in talking about, Poseidon!" Furious, she shoves him away and changes shape - there's a herd of horses nearby, and she dives in among them, thinking to take a breather and disappear. Folds herself in small, small enough she might seem nothing but a mortal horse.

And yet.

Afterwards, she kicks him so hard he flies across the meadow, straight through a huge stone and shattering in his passing, and takes off, cursing. Wasted time. She does not find Persephone in Arcadia, and a rain of leaves marks her passing. Wider, then. Demeter goes further, down to Cilicia and into Egypt, follows the line in the sand between desert and straining grass and tall trees, until she reaches the mountains of Atlas. It's been days, more than that, and she still cannot feel her, _find her_. Demeter goes to the garden of the Hesperides half out of despairing hope, half for a touch of familiarity. The nymphs attending the golden apple trees feel like home, feel like her daughter, flowers in their hair and they cluster about her as she wanders around the trees, herd her away from the dragon who wouldn't dare touch her anyway.

"Lady Demeter? What is it?"

Their faces blur, and Demeter, though she knows their names, the number of them, can suddenly not recognize the voice who asks her the question, cannot remember what name goes with what face. All she's seeing is her daughter's flower-crowned face, for all that they share no similarity at all.

"You should sit, Lady Demeter, please. What is it? What do you need?"

She sits less because she intends to and more because there are hands gently pressing down on her shoulders, lightly pulling her veil tighter around her, offering her a kantharos of nectar, a plate of ambrosial bread. She does not touch either.

"My daughter. Have any of you seen her?"

They share a glance, twilight-eyed, dawn-haired; worried, confused.

"No, Lady Demeter. Do you think she's here? We haven't seen anyone."

Demeter shakes her head and bows over the kantharos, still not touching it. She sits there until the shadows are long and cooling, darkness crawling in. The flare of a torch almost startles her off the rock, and Demeter looks up into dark eyes, dark hair, a full face pale like the moon and shadowed with craters under the cheekbones. Hekate.

"I was passing by and heard the Hesperides talking. What happened?"

Hekate isn't a nymph, and she cannot be so easily brushed aside or ignored, doesn't melt into the earth or the sky to take on the guise of her daughter. It gives her something to focus on, and so Demeter sucks in a wet breath while Hekate drives her torch into the ground, folds herself onto her knees by Demeter's feet like a child, and puts the food down on the ground so she can take her hands. Hekate's hands feel old and brittle, soft, as they stroke her fingers, the back of her hands. This despite that they are unlined and strong, as unmarked by age as Demeter's or her daughter's would be. They don't feel like Persephone's hands, and it allows Demeter to look at Hekate and see only the goddess sitting there, narrow mouth pulled in a little moue, a notch of a frown between slimly arching eyebrows.

"Persephone was gathering flowers with her friends, and I felt--- she _disappeared_ , Hekate! I can't feel her, I can't find her, it's as if she doesn't exist anymore!" And that, then, is when the tears she's kept locked up spill over. She folds in over herself, pressing her face to Hekate's hands, her wet cheek to thin fingers and shudders until the trees around her quake. How could she ever not find her daughter? It's inconceivable. Persephone cannot be dead. Cannot, because the world would know, _she_ would know, and there would not be this uncomprehending stillness from everyone she meets, confusion and questions in return instead of knowledge of what she's asking about. Then, too, the Deathless Ones do not truly die, that is simply not how it works. The Titans locked in Tartarus aren't really dead, not as such, and even if something could've happened to her daughter in such a way that she'd be obliged to go below and Artemis and Athena had somehow missed it, they'd still have known. But they hadn't.

"Come, oh, come here, come, Demeter, take this." Hekate cajoles her, murmuring and squeezing her hands until she looks up, until Hekate can free a hand and give her the torch she'd driven into the ground, and then she pulls out a second, lights it as well. "I will come with you. I can see and go some places you can't, so perhaps together we will find her. Don't let go of all that anger just yet in favour of tears, Demeter. You might still need it."

Despite the solemn softness of her voice, there's an implacable grimness hung about the words, glittering in Hekate's eyes like the emerging stars in the sky above them. Demeter dries her face and stands up, nodding sharply. Yes. Not yet. She can cry from grief or happiness as soon as she has some indication of where Persephone has gone, so she will not spill any more tears yet. 

They leave the Hesperides sleeping in a sweet-smelling pile about the coils of Ladon, night following them like a curtain drawn over a window. A golden apple, heavy and softly overripe, falls with a heavy splat onto the ground as Demeter's last footstep falls outside the garden.

They cross over the narrow, unguarded opening of the sea to walk along the Mediterranean’s northern coast, the torches casting drops of light around them, small against the darkness. They do not find Persephone. They go south as the dawn creeps back in, over rolling hills that, sometime in the far future, will hold a city world-renowned; now there's only small settlements, one on each hill. They do not pause here; there's no trace of Persephone. The further south they go, the slower Demeter's steps become and she clutches more tightly onto Hekate's arm. Hekate doesn't ask why, not even as they stand on the beach and watch the opposite shore of Thrinacia.

"It was one of her favourite places," Demeter whispers, and her breath fogs briefly despite that it is warm summer, "it would be a place she'd go."

If Persephone was free to go there, if she might wish to be found, if she was afraid and searched out a favoured place to hide and, while it wasn't home, her mother would be likely to go there and find her. But Demeter fears. Fears to find only empty fields, barren of flowers and inhabited by nothing but Helios' cattle. Persephone had been very fond of them, running laughing around their stocky bodies when she was no taller than Demeter's knees and ignored by the cows until she attempted to climb them, or to dangle from their horns. Then Demeter had stepped in and taken her in her arms, scolding her smiling daughter until she pouted and begged forgiveness by throwing chubby arms around her mother's neck and loudly kissing her cheeks and nose and chin. A long time ago, that, but Persephone's fondness for the island has lingered into the present, and so Demeter fears to go, fears to find it as empty of her daughter as every other place has shown itself to be.

"And it's a place she will go again," Hekate says firmly, squeezing Demeter's shoulder where her arm is thrown around them, "but for that, we have to find her first."

It's yet up to Hekate to find them a boat to ferry them across, for Demeter cannot make herself move one way or another - they've been standing there on the beach in full view of the fishermen out on the sea and the village behind them, so it is easier to pretend to need human vehicles. A boat, and Demeter stares across the diminishing distance with her lips pressed thin, though not distracted enough not to give the old man who'd ferried them across precious payment that will last him more than a year. They step onto the beach and Demeter screams, fury and fear tangling together until she sinks to her knees.

"She's not here."

So quiet, compared to the yell earlier. 

Hekate closes her eyes, then opens them again. Stares at the cows watching them, placid-eyed and sweet-faced, with light seeming to glimmer from their horns. A shadow flickers over them, and then Helios lands his chariot on the other side of the meadow, turning the grass burnished gold, the air white. He crosses the field only slowly, touching his cattle as he goes, then comes to a stop in front of Demeter and helps her back to her feet.

"You know where she is, Demeter," Helios says, as quietly as he can, but the air shivers with heat from the weight of it, and Demeter closes her eyes, squeezes them tightly shut and shakes her head. Her jaw is gritted so tightly it's a wonder there's not an audible sound of grinding from her teeth. "There's only one place your daughter can be while being gone from the world, while being unknown to the Deathless Ones, and her father gave his lawful permission to a suitable bridegroom for her to be there."

A tremble, like a rushing autumn wind buffeting a slender birch, goes through Demeter, and she squeezes her hands into white-knuckled fists.

"How _dare he_!" Demeter's scream tears at the air, the grass; Helios hugs her to his chest, buries her face there just in time to avoid any damage to his cows, and frowns down at her. His hand is gentle, though, where it's stroking her hair under a veil now ragged with Demeter's fury, black again like it'd been when she'd transformed back and kicked Poseidon away. "He knows my opinion about this! I thought--- he..."

There's a single sob, the conflagration collapsing in on itself. Helios hands Demeter over to Hekate, who takes the hands reaching for her with firm surety and a gentleness that make her grip seem like that of a mother, though by apparent age she and Demeter more look like they could be sisters.

"Thank you, Helios," Demeter says quietly, her voice so flat the true gratitude is drowned under the accusation of making her face what she had at least partially already known; with her daughter nowhere to be found on Earth, the Underworld was the only place she could be. Not as one belonging there, though, not as one dead. No, what had happened was a rearranging of order, though following along established paths, which is why there's not been any more upheaval than Persephone's bridal abduction had caused in her flower meadow.

Demeter leaves Thrinacia brown where she'd stood. With a glower and a grunt, Helios takes a few aggravated moments more to herd his cattle to a better grazing spot before he takes his chariot back up into the sky.

Hekate walks with Demeter back to Achaean lands, down through Epirus and Boeotia. Kisses her cheek and tells her she will be back. Demeter nods, gestures her away; she cannot hold Hekate with her for so very long no matter how her heart aches for the company. Hekate has duties. Demeter does as well, but she has ignored them for over a week by now and will continue to do so. The lack of respect shown in the way this has been done! Yes, she would not have approved of _any_ husband Zeus might have suggested for Persephone, for she would much rather her daughter remain as unbound as she - it's not as if that would preclude love, after all. But what does that refusal matter, when Zeus went about it things this way? Is she not worth more? She'd truly thought so.

It seems she was wrong.

Fury, fear, and now grief, has kept Demeter walking for days on end, but now without Hekate's support, she wavers. Takes her rest at a well, shadowed by a plane tree. She doesn't intend to stay here, but the girls coming to fetch water manage to convince her to come with them while she's disguised as an old woman. It'd seemed the best such form to take to be overlooked, but instead it'd drawn sweetly voiced concern. She hadn't been able to refuse them, for they reminded her of Persephone - in their air and as a little younger, not the physical resemblance the Hesperides shares with her daughter. Their mother is as gracefully welcoming as the girls had been concerned for her well-being, and the husband is both a good husband, father, and ruler. She takes their struggling little boy and makes sure he thrives - Metaneira bids her to name him, since she made sure he survived, and perhaps that's where she goes wrong. Or maybe she should have ignored the poor child and not taken him in her arms, for babies die nearly every day, for many reasons. But she could not stand it, and so she's become attached.

Perhaps it's as much love of this darling child, his family and his brother, eagerly listening to all she's told young Triptolemos so far, as it's an urge to spite Zeus that she decides to burn Demophoon's mortality away and make him immortal. Perhaps she's so focused on that, that is why Metaneira comes upon her one night.

"Doso, the fire! We've cared for you, and you've cared for him as your own! My son, _why_?" she cries, and in it Demeter can hear the cry of a grieving mother - her own cry. She snatches the boy out and shoves him into his mother's arms, revealing him untouched by the flames, if skin still hot beneath the protection of ambrosia. She's furious, but the grief - shared, though this is but a mortal mother - and her affection, keeps her from lashing out.

"He would have been immortal, foolish woman, and now he shall suffer the fate of all humans! I have cared for him as one of my own up until now, and by that, know me for what I am, Metaneira!" Now, she steps out of her guise, and Metaneira, breathless, nearly witless for the bright weight of divinity, sinks to her knees. Demophoon giggles and reaches for the goddess, unknowing of the weight nearly crushing the room, and Demeter closes her eyes. Breathes out, settles down. Bids the queen of Eleusis to stand and though she does not take Demophoon back into her arms - he does not need it any longer, will in truth live a longer and healthier life than any mortal man might - she keeps Triptolemos by her side as she demands a temple built. It will shield her, house her, for she will not go back to Olympos.

By the well, the plane tree drops its leaves.

Months turn, and Hekate comes into Demeter's chosen stronghold trailing the wailings of the world outside Eleusis; the harvest is failing, though Eleusis is still sweetly green and heavy with grain.

"I passed Iris, just now, what's goi--- _Demeter_?" Hekate pauses, staring at Demeter where she sits by the hearth placed at the back of her temple, a space for her to dwell in preference of Olympos. Stares at the goddess and her stomach, grown huge. There's a suggestion of grim shadow ever lingering in Demeter's eyes, no less so now than months ago when she first knew where Persephone had gone, and it swells now again, her lips thinning.

"Poseidon wouldn't know when it's a good time to push if it so hit him on the head," Demeter sneers, though she holds a hand out, for where she'd rebuffed poor, shining Iris who was only doing her job, she has much missed Hekate, "and so he's left his mark."

Hekate comes over, kneeling, again, by Demeter's feet as if she's a young girl. Her small hands on Demeter's growing stomach seemingly smaller and sweeter still, curious as if this is a sight unseen by her eyes before.

"I see. Why the mortals, Demeter?" When she looks up she could be aged beyond age, though her face is almost entirely unlined. Demeter, however, is unmoved by the Titanides' divine grace.

"If Zeus will not heed me by the respect I'm owed as Persephone's mother and by the affection I should hope he holds for me in his breast as his sister and a dearly loved companion both, though I'm now sorely doubting it, I will force him to listen in this way." She smiles, face as grim as her eyes, and the nearby bowl of kykeon curdles into a stinking, moldering mess. Hekate chuckles wryly and stands up, kissing Demeter's cheek.

"Beware the brood of Kronos. Very well. I'll stay with you. I think you might need help later, though I am admittedly not Artemis or Eileithyia.

And stay Hekate does as the famine deepens, spreads. Even Eleusis does not pass unharmed, but the grace of Demeter Anesidora keeps them shielded and fed, if not in abundance. Stay she does, as the months grow longer, the earth harder, refusing to yield, and what little is given, rots.

In such wise, in the end, there can be only one result.

*~*

"Mother!"

Persephone flew off the chariot as a falcon left the hand of its master, but Demeter, especially newly unburdened of her living weight as she’d been with Hekate’s help, would never be too weak to catch her daughter.

"Persephone! Oh, my darling, my eyes, my heart." Swinging her around and clutching at her daughter's shoulders, hair, face, Demeter kissed her cheeks and forehead before she pulled back even slightly. Both of them were crying, and Demeter felt light for the first time in over a year. "I thought I wouldn't ever see you again, not when I found out---"

She cut herself off, glanced past her daughter's shoulder to the dark, silver-trimmed chariot and the four magnificent horses, black like starless night, yoked to it. Glared at it as if it could by presence alone transfer her rage to its owner, Hermes at the reins the only one avoiding her displeasure. But anger or not, there was water nearby, a bright, bubbling stream, and the grass around them was turning softly green, shy wildflowers starting to poke up from the earth, and Persephone was once more in her arms.

"Nevermind. Are you all right?"

"I missed you, mother," Persephone said and briefly buried her face back in the crook of Demeter's neck, having to bend down as always. Breathed in and then straightened back up, slowly. "It was awful, in the beginning. It was---"

She shook her head, blinking away another couple tears and smiled faintly.

"The Underworld. I'm so glad I can see you again." Then she took a breath, and Demeter stiffened, staring up at her daughter. Her tall, resplendent daughter, who was bracing herself, and Demeter, who'd ignored the shiver of dark weight in her gut as she'd seen the chariot come up out of the ground, had focused on her joy to see that flaming hair again, braced herself as well. "Before I left, I ate a couple pomegranate seeds, mama."

Persephone haven't called her mother 'mama' for a very long time, but then, though she was youthful and a young goddess, she hadn't been a childish one in quite a while either. Still, Demeter grasped her by the shoulders and shook her with trembling hands as if she _was_ a child, anger and incredulity bursting up, out.

"Why? You know what eating the fruit of the Underworld would mean! Not even nectar or ambrosia, as it comes from the divine in all of us! _Literal fruit_ , grown down there! Persephone, _why_?" Demeter's voice cracked somewhere between anger and grief, and Persephone embraced her not like a lost daughter seeking refuge in the safety of her mother's arms, but a young woman having come home, soothing her mother's fears.

"He did not touch me. Not even once, mama. Not this whole time." Persephone's eyes were back-lit honey, sweetest life set in a solemn expression as she unflinchingly met Demeter's gaze. "I ended up hating him less than how I ended up with him, and that I would risk not seeing you ever again."

Her voice trembled a little, on those last couple words. Persephone’s warm, golden brown eyes changing to a liquid sheen with it, and Demeter could not hold her anger, seeing it. Persephone was still here, had come with the joy and relief and _happiness_ , and none of it was a false front to please Demeter.

"Oh, _love_ ," Demeter moaned, clutched her close and buried her nose in Persephone's hair. It smelled of sweet rot and something eternally floral. Familiar and alien both, and she did not quail away from it. Demeter sighed, pulled back so she could cup Persephone's cheeks. Her daughter leaned into the touch, raising her hands to lay them on top of Demeter's, and they stood there, just staring, drinking each other in, for a couple silent, spring-breezed moments.

"I think it will be all right, mother," Persephone whispered, so quiet as if she still feared to acknowledge it despite having proclaimed so boldly that she'd eaten the pomegranate seeds. And though a little spike of anger stirred in Demeter at hearing it, more than that she could hear what Persephone rather needed of her from those words. So instead she embraced her again, tucked her close as if she was a little girl, just for that moment, and stroked her hair.

"You are a woman and a goddess, Persephone, and the daughter of two children of Kronos; your honour won't come only from your position as your husband's wife and the Queen of the Underworld, but in your own right as well. If my brother has behaved with a minimum of decorum towards you, to make you feel eating those seeds would lead to good for you, and not ill, I believe you made the right decision."

"Thank you," Persephone said as she hugged her mother close. "I wouldn't ever just _settle_."

Demeter smiled, grimly pleased, at the newfound steel in her daughter's voice. If she could sound like that after this past year, all would be well. And so around them, the field outside Demeter's temple overflowed with fruit and flowers, with heavy, green corn as hadn't been seen in a year.


End file.
